Here are the books I averaged:
I counted up the number of pages each author used to discuss important people. For example, the top five people discussed by Paul Johnson were:
For Eric Hobsbawm, the list was:
In order to compare these two authors, I need a common unit of measurement. If I just add the page counts together, Johnson bigger book will overwhelm Hobsbaum.
Its obvious that I need to figure some sort of percentage, but if I just divide the number of pages discussing Hitler into the total number of pages in the book, then I will be penalizing authors with diferent styles. For example, Johnson really slugs away at people he doesn't like. He names names and delves deeply into biography. He spends large chunks of his book discussing a handful of individuals:
Meanwhile, Hobsbawm is more analytical. Instead of chronicaling the Byzantine intricacies of people's careers, he tries to understand broader trends of society. He mention individuals briefly, almost in passing:
Hobsbawm loses again, simply because he doesn't focus on personalities. (Ironically, it probably says more if a person gets mentioned in Hobsbawm; it means that he is so important that even Hobsbawm mentions him.)
Instead, I drew up a list from each authority and gave each list an equal weight (=1). For example, let's assume that the above lists are 5 names long. That makes the total pages allocated in Johnson's list 394, and the total pages in Hobsbaums list 121. If we calculate percentages of the list, then we get these percentages for Johnson:
And these for Hobsbawm:
This gives us numbers which can be compared directly, without giving an undue advantage to either historian.
In practice, I pulled more than five names from each authority. Generally I tried to gather the 25 or 35 most frequently dicussed individuals.
Sometimes I didn't use the exact number of pages. If the book was so thick that each VIP in the index required a full column of entries and referenced duplicate pages, I would count the number of lines in an index entry rather than tried to untangle the duplications in the page numbers.
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Last updated April 1998
Copyright © 1998 Matthew White